VATICAN CITY - People who don't
give money to the
homeless be­cause
they think it will be spent on alcohol and not food should ask themselves what guilty pleasures
they are secretly spending money on, Pope
Francis said.

"There are many excuses" to
justify why one doesn't lend a hand when asked by a person beg­ging on the
street,
he said in an in­terview
published the day before the beginning of Lent.

But giving something
to some­one in
need "is always right," and it should be done with
respect and
compassion.

The interview,
published on Feb 28, was conducted by
the monthly magazine, Scarp de' Tenis (Tennis Shoes), which serves
homeless and
marginalised people in Milan.

Of the several
questions the
pope was asked, one focused on whether he thought
giving money to
people begging on the street was the right thing to
do.

One thing people may
tell themselves
to feel better about not giving anything, the
pope said, is
"I give money and then he spends it on drinking a glass
of wine."

But, the pope said,
if "a glass of wine is the only
happiness he has in life, that's OK.
Instead, ask yourself what do you do on the sly? What `happiness' do you seek
in secret?"

Or, another way to look
at it, the pope
said, is recognise how "you are luckier, with a
house, a wife,
children" and then ask why should the responsibility to help be pushed onto someone
else.

When encountering people who live on the street,
the pope said he
always greets them and sometimes inquires
about their lives and background.

He always chatted with a
homeless family and couple that lived
next to the archbishop's resi­dence in
Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said, and never considered get­ting
rid of them.